Know This: Who Really Runs Washington:
A Review of Shadow Elite by Janine Wedel
January 20, 2010
OBAMA SUPPORTERS who believed campaign promises that true change was finally coming to Washington but were disappointed by the new president’s appointed economic advisors have had a year to see what exactly the administration planned to accomplish with the likes of Larry Summers and other Robert Rubin disciples and Goldman Sachs alumni once again responsible for our country’s economic health. As anthropologist, award-winning author, and professor of public policy at George Mason University Janine Wedel states in Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market, the involvement of Summers—and other “confidence men” like him with notoriously questionable loyalties—in the upper echelons of the U.S. government actually makes sense when one studies the behind-the-scenes realities of our eroding democracy:
“The new breed of players, who operate at the nexus of official and private power, cannot only co-op public policy agendas, crafting policy with their own purposes in mind. They test the time-honored principles of both the canons of accountability of the modern state and the codes of competition of the free market. In so doing, they reorganize relations between bureaucracy and business to their advantage, and challenge the walls erected to separate them. As these walls erode, players are better able to use official power and resources without public oversight.”
Wedel uses the term “flexians” to describe players who serve at once as business consultants, think-tankers, television pundits, academics, and/or government advisers, many of whom have transnational ties that make their true loyalties even more difficult to peg. By pursuing “coincidences” of interest, these flexians “interweave and perform overlapping roles that serve their own goals or those of their associates” by performing work that (prior to the Reagan administration’s first steps toward whittling down government) once was performed solely by government officials. Such involvement in government work also gives these connected but private citizens remarkable access to official information they not only can (and do) use for their private gain, but manipulate in order to ensure a message that promotes their (and their associates’) ultimate goal is disseminated to and supported in all levels of government…and by the general public.
How does the involvement of flexians in a U.S. administration undermine our country’s democratic system? When people who work “stealthily” for a U.S. administration and effectively influence policy decisions while retaining and honoring above all their profitable ties to private organizations, Wedel explains, they are ultimately held accountable “only to their patrons.” “Such players are not confined by government diplomacy or lobbying rules, yet they routinely perform those functions in a way few diplomats or lobbyists would have the portfolio to do.” Not only do these players impact the immediate environment in which they work, however. They also effectively change systems from those with appropriate checks and balances to those with practically none: “The new system they help fashion blurs the boundaries between the state and private sectors, bureaucratic and market practices, and legal and illegal standing.”
Throughout Shadow Elite, Wedel documents the impact of individual power players, including a retired military leader turned military analyst-academic-government advisor-television personality promoting the invasion of Iraq, and a former government official and “unofficial” U.S. government envoy who’s also a businessman, lobbyist, founder and officer of a (generally considered objective) nongovernmental organization who also happens to be a Republican Party activist with considerable ties to powerful neoconservatives…and who works as a strategist for the largest federal contractor, Lockheed Martin. She details situations in which officers at private companies not only drive public policy, but have dangerous access to formerly official information. In one case, “a private company, given ‘government’ access to sensitive and private data about citizens of the United States and other countries, not only worked alongside government to analyze the data, but then also (supposedly) oversaw the process.” Cases are also discussed that involve the impossible coexistence of fair competition for government contracts among contractors, some of whom influence the granting of those contracts. “Network-based decision-making, off-record deal making, and convoluted lines of authority—all ingredients in the personalization of bureaucracy” have become the most powerful governing tactics in a system ruled by powerfully connected—and power-hungry—flexians. Public service and accountability matter little, if any, in this new system of governing because public disclosure is no longer necessary, or desired.
Wedel emphasizes that most influential flexians work within a group of other power players with intertwined, if not identical, interests. These groupings of power brokers, termed by Wedel as “flex nets,” go far beyond old-fashioned Good Old Boy networks or interest or lobbyist groups. While flex nets “serve a long-established function (of) negotiating between official and private,” they also have four key features that set them apart: they 1) personalize bureaucracy, 2) privatize information while branding conviction (through efforts that meld the group based on shared beliefs and promote their cause through easy-to-grasp stories the public loves to hear over and over again…even if the stories are only partially (or not at all) true), 3) juggle roles and representations (to best respond to individual situations as they arise), and 4) relax rules at the interstices of official and private institutions.
How is all this deception possible? Wedel, who has also studied public policy and the immense impact of powerful flexians and their flex nets in post-communist Eastern Bloc nations, writes that flexians quickly recognize and take advantage of opportunities presented when a world order is in such a flux that no checks or balances have yet been established that might present obstacles to their goals. Flexians’ own efforts to create an environment in which they can operate unfettered as well as their impressive contacts with those in power help ensure no changes will be made from above that might impede their progress…at least for a little while and probably for much longer.
“Ironically perhaps,” Wedel writes, “the formerly communist world and the maneuverings that flowed from its transition away from communism proved an ideal training ground for examining governing, power, and influence in the United States at the dawn of the twenty-first century. There the new era of blurred boundaries is marked by privatization and contracting out, and a resulting fusion (and confusion) of state and private power.”
This new system of power and influence Wedel has observed not only in post-communist countries but in our own democracy is the product not only of players who recognized the disarray that would allow them to come quickly to power, but of “an unprecedented confluence of four transformational developments that arose in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries”:
1) the redesign of government via increased government outsourcing (which is documented thoroughly in this book) and the rise of executive power (also documented via studies of accelerating rates of executive signing statements—notes that effectively disable or at least limit pieces of legislation a president signs but doesn’t completely embrace—that skyrocketed during the Bush II administration and reportedly continues in the Obama White House);
2) the end of the Cold War (see below);
3) the development and dissemination of increasingly complex technologies, most notably technologies that continue to impact information and communication; and
4) the “embrace of ‘truthiness,’ which allows people to play with how they present themselves to the world, regardless of fact or track record.”
By manipulating their roles in the new world order these parallel developments have created, flexians successfully create their own advantageous “institutional forms of power and influence, in which official and private power and influence are interdependent and even reinforce each other.” The result Wedel has observed and documents so precisely in Shadow Elite is an entirely new system “that undermines the principles that have long defined modern states, free markets, and democracy itself.”
Since the end of the Cold War, Wedel states, “the architecture of much of federal governing has transformed.” “A major pillar of this structure is the shadow government that today comprises the companies, consulting firms, nonprofits, think tanks, and other nongovernmental entities that swell the ranks of contractors.” (Wedel notes that currently nearly 75 percent of “work of federal government, measured in terms of jobs, is contracted out.” Federal intelligence agencies contract out so much of their work that one giant consulting firm has been dubbed “the shadow intelligence agency.”) Wedel explains that many of these “private actors” or contractors act interdependently with government and are involved in “all aspects” of governing and negotiating policies from their creation to their implementation and even their enforcement—despite many of these actors’ allegiances to the very companies that grant contracts via these same policies, and with little oversight by supervisors who actually work for the government.
While Wedel does not set out to determine potential strategies for tracking or controlling flexians and their powerful flex nets, she does state the simple questions government and private personnel can ask when presented with an apparently influential person whose ultimate loyalties may not be clear: “Who is he? Who funds him? For whom does he work? Where, ultimately does his allegiance lie?”
Can such questions be answered easily regarding Larry Summers in his current role as top economic advisor to our standing president? Where does his allegiance lie, indeed. Where do the allegiances of any government appointees—those not subjected to congressional approval or an election by voters of the regions they represent—lie? As Wedel puts it: “Private players are [now] afforded fresh opportunities to make governing and policy decisions without meaningful government involvement.” Those players given special access to governing without being forced to present the truth behind their loyalties—past and present—or held accountable for their actions—past and present—don’t deserve the power our country’s “new” form of democracy gives them.
Last year at this time, more than a few Washington and Wall Street watchers cried foul as the trend among successive administrations from both major political parties continued to give so many former Goldman Sachs alumni (Robert Rubin, Henry Paulson, Timothy Geithner, and Larry Summers, for starters) so much power. Why did our current president, who campaigned on a promise of remarkable change, immediately appoint to his administration the same players who contributed to the deregulation efforts and subsequent banking debacles that led to a worldwide economic crisis? A year later, Obama supporters continue to wait for answers. Is it possible our government somehow can’t function or stands to suffer irreparable harm if it doesn’t continue to collude with the powers-that-be in the financial industry? Is our government that irrevocably intertwined with the private sector? Are our government leaders that concerned with their own post-governing careers to want to forsake the public trust they swore to uphold just to protect their own private assets? In Shadow Elite, Janine Wedel may have provided more answers to these questions than anyone in the upper echelons of the U.S. government—especially current flexians-in-power like Larry Summers—would like to admit.
—Sherry Seiber
**Shadow Elite was recently named the first Huffington Post Book Club selection for 2010 by Arianna Huffington.
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